How can you persuasively discuss the negative effects of climate change on human health to motivate change in your community? How do you encourage your friends, family, neighbors and community leaders to take meaningful action to address these impacts? In this course, you will learn to communicate the health-related risks of climate change effectively to the public and policymakers and motivate positive changes in climate-related behaviors. Starting with a review of best practices in health risk communication, the course examines the specific challenges of climate change communication and successful strategies to address these challenges. Throughout the course, you will build a step-by-step plan for developing and delivering a communications campaign.

Impartido por:

Connie Roser-Renouf

Transcripción

Okay, welcome back. What we're going to do now is review the material that we've covered through these lectures. I want you to remember as you go out and work to communicate climate change and health to your public's, that the public is not a description of a target audience. That there are many different views about climate change within the public, the issue is diverse, depolarized, divided. And in order to have a successful public information campaign, you need to take in into account this diversity targeting specific groups. And that targeting should be based on how much they understand about the issue. How much they believe or they recognize or accept the science. Their values what they're currently doing, their information needs. And also their issue engagement, how much do they care about the issue. And also the social norms within their communities as well as the physical context. All of those are going to shape the what the audience does and should be reflected in the way that we design our campaigns. All right, Global Warming's Six Americas, that segmentation captures the diversity of public opinion in the US. They are the six distinct groups that range across the spectrum of concern and issue engagement. With concern highest among the alarmed and decreasing with each subsequent segment. Until we get to active opposition among the dismissive who are likely to think this is a hoax. And then there is also this curvilinear relationship we've talked about an issue involvement. That the dismissive at the end are more engaged with the issue than the people in the middle. They are just engaged in opposition to what those of us who are alarmed are working toward. The five key beliefs are great distinguishers between the group's. First that climate change is real and that's being certain that climate change is real, that we are causing it and that is harmful. Recognition that there's a scientific consensus that it the human-caused climate changes is happening. And the important fifth belief that we can do something to reduce climate change and to protect ourselves from its impacts. The segments that have the strongest beliefs on the issue pay attention to information on the topic, but they may process it differently. That the alarmed or going to learn the information and respond to it while the dismissive are likely to argue against and reject the information. And those middle segments, less likely to pay attention. And to reach them we have to use different strategies, mostly through mass media that are going to reach a wide audience. Cognitions and affect play distinct roles in shaping people's behaviors. We talked about the cognitions as the rider. The thoughts determine where the person decides they want to go and affect provides the motivation to actually get there. Changing people's knowledge about climate change is generally a necessary condition for behavior change. But it's not a sufficient condition people must be motivated as well. And Americans currently know very little about the health impacts of climate change. So they have high knees for new knowledge about health impacts. Messages on health impacts for a wide variety of types of impacts, they will increase audience concern. But the effects the immediate effects will wear off over time forgetting. And that comes back to the importance that message repetition to inhibit decay in the effects. So the elephant motivations that includes risk perceptions, emotions and values. Risk perceptions are very important in terms of motivating behavior. But there's they're only good motivators if people feel there is something that they can do to reduce the threat. If they don't feel that there is something that they are personally able to do, and that will be effective to reduce the threat then they're likely to engage in fear control. Which means discounting the threat, avoiding the issue forgetting it distorting it. Doing things to reduce the fear the felt sense of fear, but they aren't going to do anything to reduce the actual threat. That's what we want to avoid having happen. Some audiences need to hear that global warming poses a real threat to them and their communities because they just don't know that. They think of this, this is the polar bears, this is people in developing countries, this is future generations, it's not us. So they need to hear that in order to raise their engagement with the issue. However, that information has to be accompanied by information on solutions to avoid having the message backfire. In terms of values cultural and moral values in the US. Those account in large part for the polarization between conservatives and liberals. That the conservatives tend to have high individualism, the liberals tend to have high egalitarianism. And we as liberals many of us who are in the environmental communication community tend to frame messages in terms of our values, rather than in terms of conservative values. Similarly, we have proposed solutions that are consistent with our values and not their values. The research on solution aversion, we saw that you can reduce opposition to climate action among conservatives by proposing solutions that are consistent with their values. This holds also in terms of moral values, the moral foundations values that Haidt and Graham have outlined. So we want to think about framing messages in terms of those moral values that conservatives tend to have. Of loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and the purity and sanctity of nature that we don't want to violate, we don't want to sully nature. That framing messages with those kinds of values can overcome the polarization that we see with conservatives and liberals. Framing climate change is a health threat has promised also for reaching across the ideological divide. Loss framing and a focus on local impacts are also promising more research, we need more research on framing. But the body of research that we have at this point indicates those are all great frames. And I want to point out or remind you that these kinds of messages have been shown to work in the lab. For reaching across the political divide and engaging conservatives not just liberals. However, when people go back to their tribe, and then use the media sources that they typically use, their going to get exposed to counter messages. So the messages won't stick unless we get people exposed to the much more often than they typically have been. Turning to social norms and the way they shape our behavior. We are largely unconscious of how this happens, but we are influenced by both descriptive and injunctive norms. Messages describing positive descriptive norms can outweigh moral admonitions in determining what people do. So as in the example, I gave you of crossing the street, jaywalking. The injunctive norm here is you shouldn't jaywalk. But I look around in a city that I'm visiting and I see everybody else's jaywalking I will too, if nobody's ake walking I won't either. That is, the descriptive norm is more powerful than the injunctive norm. But if a descriptive norm encourages the wrong behaviors, as in this case, messages would be better or received and more effective if they invoke injunctive norms rather than descriptive norms. We should not tell the audience how many people are doing the thing that we want people to stop doing. If we tell them the harmful behavior is prevalent, we would just encourage them to do it more. We also want to make sure that when we highlight descriptive norms for behaviors that are beneficial and are prevalent that we recognize them as praiseworthy. Because if people recognize that they are doing better than the average they're likely to stop doing it as much. They'll tend to to go toward what the average for the community is, as in the case of energy use. The people who understood that they were using less energy than their neighbors turned around and started using more. Unless they also received the injunctive message that it was benefit that was good, that they were recognized as being good citizens for doing that. All right turning to social influence through interpersonal communication. Attitude and behavior change are more likely to result from interpersonal than from mediated message. And typically what we see is that influence flows from a few innovators within the culture, to early adopters of the innovation who act as opinion leaders. Some of those early adopters will act as opinion leaders sharing what they've learned with large social networks. Then the the change takes off and we see many more people adopting. The information tends to flow through social networks that go in multiple steps. So initially we thought of this as a two-step process from the media to the opinion leader to the rest of us. But subsequent research has developed has shown that it's a much more complex process, with social networks that are quite complex and influence flowing all around. The alarmed segments are those who are most likely within the Six America's to act as opinion leaders. And information targeted to them is likely to reach the less engaged segments of the public through their interpersonal networks. This is then a large reason why we want to try to activate the alarmed as opinion leaders, to get them to talk to other people about the issue of climate change. Turning now to the information processing theories. Systematic information processing is characteristic of the alarmed who can be targeted with extensive information. That they're going to tend to process that deeply, and we want them then to talk to it to their their social networks about it to spread that information. Motivated reasoning is characteristic of the dismissive and to some extent the doubtful. And we want to try to reach them through sources they trust. And by emphasizing the co-benefits of climate change action to increase their acceptance of climate science. And then heuristic processing is characteristic of the middle segments. We want simple clear messages from respective sources to engage them with the issue. We want to rely on the success formula in creating content for them. Simple messages that are unexpected and concrete from credible sources that tell emotional stories. That's our formula for creating the most sticky messages we can manage. Now I want to point you here in conclusion to the websites for the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication. And the Yale program on Climate Change Communication. All of the public opinion data that I have shown you is there. We have lots of journal articles as well as poll data and reports that can fill in lots of the gaps for you. Any questions that you have about communicating climate change. And what segments of the public think and feel and are doing about climate change, you can find a lot of that information there. So please go to our web sites and check out what we have to offer. I hope you have enjoyed this course. I have enjoyed teaching it,and thank you for attending.